Quote of the day: “The devastation [in Baghdad] had overwhelmed the first wave of diplomats, civilian aid workers and military personnel working under Jay M. Garner, a retired lieutenant general.’They told us to bring two suits,’ said one of General Garner’s former aides. ‘We thought we would be walking into functioning ministries, that we would fire the Baathists in the top jobs, and get the trains running again in a couple of months.‘” (Patrick E. Tyler, Overseer Adjusts Strategy as Turmoil Grows in Iraq, the New York Times,)
If I had my own paper, my front-page headline today would be: “India Refuses to Send Troops to Iraq.” Of the major papers, only one, the Los Angeles Times, came close to this. They buried the Indian news in a front-page piece on the announcement that two-thirds of the Third Infantry Division, stationed around Fallujah (whose return home was only recently announced) will stay in Iraq “indefinitely.” (Esther Schrader and Paul Richter, U.S. Delays Pullout in Iraq). To keep the Third Division there is, of course, a covert form of — let’s say the word — escalation. The Indian news, however, was actually the more important part of the story. The Third Division was staying in part because the native cavalry wasn’t going to gallop to the rescue.
Such a decision by a right-wing Hindu government eager for closer military relations with the globe’s only superpower, and heavily lobbied by its officials, offers us a remarkable window into what this occupation really looks like out there in the world. Talk about the writing on the wall. There was, of course, a powerful current of opinion in India running against sending troops. If you want to get a sense of what this sounded like, take a look at V.R. Krishna Iyer’s Not our war in the Hindu, which read in part:
“As the former Prime Minister, I. K. Gujral, said: ‘In any case, there is something un-Indian and undignified in becoming a sub-contractor to the Pentagon in order to become a sub-contractor to American multinationals. Our decision must never smack of mercenaryism.’
“I agree with Mr. Gujral that even if there had been a pretence of U.N. cover, our armed forces would have, all the same, been under the authority of the occupying powers.Indian soldiers would have lost their lives in vain not defending their own country’s freedom but in place of U.S. soldiers as targets of desperate Iraqis. Every day, American and British soldiers are dying in attacks by suicide squads. If the American troops had withdrawn and Indian troops taken over, Indian casualties would have replaced American ones.”
The Los Angeles Times reports as well that “Pakistan and Portugal – two other countries the Pentagon had been counting on to send substantial numbers of troops – have also balked.”
Why, though, is the Indian decision more important than any of the most recent, inside-the-Beltway doings, a number of which are remarkable in their own right, or the simple fact that the news floodgates have suddenly opened? Why not, as candidate for the most important story of the day, pick the fact that the old journalistic warhorse David Broder, the “dean” of the Washington Press corps and a man who hasn’t stepped an inch outside the mainstream in the last century, wrote a piece in the Washington Post startlingly entitled, Black Thursday for Bush?
(And have you all noticed that suddenly headlines and titles of opinion pieces have gotten so much fiercer?) He wrote in part:
“I agree with Mr. Gujral that even if there had been a pretence of U.N. cover, our armed forces would have, all the same, been under the authority of the occupying powers.Indian soldiers would have lost their lives in vain not defending their own country’s freedom but in place of U.S. soldiers as targets of desperate Iraqis. Every day, American and British soldiers are dying in attacks by suicide squads. If the American troops had withdrawn and Indian troops taken over, Indian casualties would have replaced American ones.”
The Los Angeles Times reports as well that “Pakistan and Portugal – two other countries the Pentagon had been counting on to send substantial numbers of troops – have also balked.”
Why, though, is the Indian decision more important than any of the most recent, inside-the-Beltway doings, a number of which are remarkable in their own right, or the simple fact that the news floodgates have suddenly opened? Why not, as candidate for the most important story of the day, pick the fact that the old journalistic warhorse David Broder, the “dean” of the Washington Press corps and a man who hasn’t stepped an inch outside the mainstream in the last century, wrote a piece in the Washington Post startlingly entitled, Black Thursday for Bush?
(And have you all noticed that suddenly headlines and titles of opinion pieces have gotten so much fiercer?) He wrote in part:
“If President Bush is not reelected, we may look back on last Thursday, July 10, 2003, as the day the shadow of defeat first crossed his political horizon. To be sure, Bush looks strong. The CBS News poll released that evening had his approval rating at 60 percent, with solid support from his own party But ‘The CBS Evening News’ that night was like Karl Rove’s worst nightmare, and the other network newscasts — still the main source of information for a large number of Americans — were not much better.
“The headlines announced by John Roberts, substituting for Dan Rather on CBS, were: “President Bush’s false claim about Iraqi weapons; he made it despite a CIA warning the intelligence was bad. More Americans say U.S. is losing control of Iraq. Also tonight, food lines in America; they’re back and getting longer’. If Iraq looks increasingly worrisome on TV and in the polls, the economy is even worse.”
And so on. Believe me, to cite another moment, this is a little like the iconic CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite during Tet 1968 declaring the Vietnam War in hopeless stalemate, a statement that sent President Lyndon Johnson reeling.
Or how about another Washington Post piece (Jonathan Weisman, Budget Deficit May Surpass $450 Billion) that began:
“War, tax cuts and a third year of a flailing economy may push this year’s budget deficit past $450 billion, according to congressional sources familiar with new White House budget forecasts. That would be 50 percent higher than the Bush administration forecast five months ago. The deficit projection due out today is nearly $50 billion more than economists anticipated just last week, and it underscores the continuing deterioration of the government’s fortunes since 2000, when the Treasury posted a $236 billion surplus. That represents a fiscal reversal exceeding $680 billion.
“‘It’s shock and awe,’ said a senior Republican Senate aide.”
The neocon dike in Washington, always a questionable edifice, has suddenly sprung a host of leaks — and angry leaking bureaucrats — while on the Left coast (my day’s entry from the Tomdispatch Dept. of Calls for Resignation), Robert Scheer launches a rocket entitled, mince-no-wordingly, A Firm Basis for Impeachment, in which he begins to lay out the trail of lies that may soon add up to “Weaponsgate.” He also implicitly calls for the resignation of Condoleezza Rice:
“Does the president not read? Does his national security staff, led by Condoleezza Rice, keep him in the dark about the most pressing issues of the day? Or is this administration blatantly lying to the American people to secure its ideological ends?…
“On national security, the buck doesn’t stop with Tenet, the current fall guy. The buck stops with Bush and his national security advisor, who is charged with funneling intelligence data to the president. That included cluing in the president that the CIA’s concerns were backed by the State Department’s conclusion that ‘the claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are highly dubious.’
“For her part, Rice has tried to fend off controversy by claiming ignorance”
Nonetheless, the story of the day is that Indian decision, not events here, and my explanation for why is not, in the end, terribly complicated: Our radical nationalists in Washington thought by landing our military in the middle of Iraq, setting up permanent bases, calling in Halliburton et. al., installing their man Chalabi, and putting their hands on one major future lever of the global oil tap, they would drive the world in directions they had long been dreaming about. And they thought it would be easy. As the quote-of-the-day indicates, with those two suits they expected to walk into the ministries of their choice, kick out the top Ba’athist bureaucrats, and install themselves – a reasonable description of “regime change” in Washington whenever one of our two parties takes over from the other after a presidential election, but a woefully inadequate framework for occupied Iraq.
Now, two suits to the wind, instead of Washington driving the world down Route 66 Baghdad, it turns out that there are unknown people behind unknown wheels in unknown cars (some possibly packed with explosives) heading for us. In a word, chaotic Iraq is driving Washington. This is clearly what the Indian government saw. And who wouldn’t step out of the way under the circumstances?
Let me just say that again: chaotic Iraq is driving Washington, and that’s the grim guarantee that none of what’s starting to happen in our capital will go away soon. After all, much of what’s now known about stories like that of the Niger uranium forgeries — or the unmanned drones, or the aluminum tubing for Iraq’s nuclear program, or Saddam’s ties to al Qaeda, or the possibility that an Iraqi WMD program no longer existed, or government prevarications and exaggerations about all of this, or intelligence scamming, or many other subjects — could have been known prewar. (I knew about most of it anyway, and I assure you my intelligence sources are something less than overwhelming.)
So what’s changed? The answer isn’t complicated. The occupation of Iraq is proving a catastrophe. The new Governing Council was introduced yesterday by the occupation authorities. Its first decision was to abolish six national holidays of the Saddam era, including July 14th, the anniversary of the day in 1958 when the Iraqi monarchy was overthrown (which seems to have been celebrated in the streets yesterday anyway). In their place, a new holiday was announced, April 9, the day U.S. forces took Baghdad and Saddam “fell,” the date, that is, of the beginning of the occupation. I’m no Iraqi expert but — whether in the process they’ve actually subtracted five holiday days from the calendar or not — this doesn’t seem like the canniest first gesture for a group intent on establishing independence from the occupation regime. In the meantime, Paul Bremer seems to be considering wacky privatization schemes like the equivalent of oil-fuelled retirement IRAs for a population largely without work.
Underneath all this — and here’s the important thing — is resistance, still relatively small-scale and largely but not totally in the Sunni parts of Iraq, but increasingly coordinated and sophisticated as well. Americans are dying in small numbers and not only is that not going to stop any time soon, but a larger catastrophe is almost completely predictable. Sooner or later, someplace where there are lots of American troops will be hit by mortars, or a suicide bomber, or a leftover Frog missile, or who knows what, and there will be a lot more dead Americans. You don’t have to be a genius to predict this, though I’m struck that nobody here cares to say it.
Underneath all this lies a deeper history, not of Iraq, but of the globe for the last two centuries or more. You might say that much of the history of those two centuries is of empires and of resistance. You land in someone else’s country, always with plans, always with clever ways to govern, and the next thing you know you find yourself embroiled in uprisings and guerrilla wars of one sort or another. It happened to the Brits in Iraq in the early 1920s; now, it seems, it’s imperial America’s turn.
Believe me, it has nothing to do with noble resisters. I suspect, to go back to the beginning, you wouldn’t have wanted to spend tons of time with retro Catholic peasants conducting the first brutal guerrilla resistance war of modern times in early years of the 19th century against Napoleon’s imperial troops (or, for that matter, with the Russians who burned down their own capital, Moscow, to deny it to Napoleon in the other national guerrilla war of resistance of that era).
This administration can call the Iraqi resisters “dead-enders” or “Ba’athist remnants” or anything else they want. It doesn’t matter. History tells us they’re not going away and this isn’t ending, not any time soon anyway, and so as long as we occupy their country, they, in turn, will continue to fuel the unraveling that is just beginning in Washington, and the Indians and others will recognize that for what it is and probably not ride to the rescue. And given telecommunications these days, the “dead-enders” will know it, too. Just like senators, congressmen, and journalists here, they undoubtedly will have access to Zogby and Gallup and all the rest. Paul Bremer should buy some extra suits. He’ll need them.
Prewar, our men in Washington read all those books about occupations and leadership, but they forgot to read their Watergate manuals and no one told them to read one other crucial book — which all of you should pick up ASAP — Jonathan Schell’s The Unconquerable World. No one has better told the story of those three centuries of resistance to empire or laid out for us what paths, other than imperial adventure, are open to us in a world where violence is becoming the greatest dead-ender of all. Full disclosure, I edited the book, but don’t take my word for it, read Howard Zinn, who reviewed the book (“profoundly important,” he called it) in Sunday’s Boston Globe.
And then, check out below, James Carroll’s latest devastating column on how “intelligence” really works in Washington; or Carol Brightman’s striking account at AlterNet of the kind of resistance we’re facing in Iraq; or Jim Lobe’s detailed account at TomPaine.com of how the fraudulent Saddam-al Qaeda connection was created out of thin but potent air. Tom
America’s unintelligence community
By James Carroll
The Boston Globe
July 15, 2003So the intelligence community has provided faulty information to policy makers who then used it to justify disastrous decisions. When have I heard this story before?
Was it in 1944 when a savage Allied air war against cities was based on British intelligence assessments (disputed by some Americans) that bombing would destroy enemy ”morale”?
Or was it in 1945 when Manhattan Project intelligence, overseen by Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, provided estimates (disputed by scientists) that the Soviet Union would not have the atomic bomb for up to 20 years?
Or was it in the 1950s when American intelligence so emphasized the monolithic character of world communism that it missed the obvious anti-Moscow nationalist fractures in Yugoslavia and China?
Or was it in 1960 when US Air Force intelligence, having seen a ”bomber gap,” then discovered a ”missile gap,” sparking major escalations in the arms race with the Soviet Union?
To read more Carroll click here
It Wasn’t Supposed to Be Like This
By Carol Brightman
AlterNet
July 14, 2003“Quit beating around the bush,” snaps the Wall Street Journal: “America faces a guerrilla war.” And so it does. But an odd paralysis still grips the U.S. military command. While the number of American soldiers killed or wounded in ambushes increases by the day, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and proconsul Paul Bremer continue to speak of “remnants” and “bitter-enders” who can’t get with the program, even as word spreads through the ranks that there is a well-organized resistance campaign underway in Iraq.
When Saddam Hussein spoke in March of letting Americans into Iraqi cities, especially Baghdad, and breaking their will, he meant it. After all, his government had been training civilians in combat techniques and distributing firearms, including AK-47 rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, for a year before the invasion; and U.S. planners knew it.
Carol Brightman is a biographer and journalist whose next book, “Total Insecurity: The Myth of American Omnipotence,” is due out in fall 2004.
To read more Brightman click here
Faulty Connection
By Jim Lobe
TomPaine.com
July 15, 2003As calls mount for a full-scale investigation into the Bush administration’s manipulation of intelligence on Iraq’s nonexistent nuclear and chemical weapons program, let’s hope that the other causus bellum on which the administration based its war — the alleged link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein — also gets the scrutiny it deserves.
While the link was hyped less by administration officials than by right-wing idealogues and the conservative press, an organized campaign was nonetheless launched to persuade the American public that such a connection was real — and represented a mortal threat.
A hint of such orchestration came in a June interview between Meet the Press host Tim Russert and former Gen. Wesley Clark, as publicized by the press watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)
To read more Lobe click here